@lyfe33, @remi1117, @allefficace, @bsmdkid,
On par with what @Dadofhskid is saying, regarding CNU (California Northstate University College of Medicine):
Right now you have nothing to compare the medical school on in terms of metrics – no students to talk to regarding the quality of basic science instruction, no one to talk to on how well they prep students for USMLE Step 1 or how well students do (pass rate, failure rate, average board score), no one to talk to regarding the quality of their third year clerkship rotations (do students write notes or more just shadow?, are there too few patients per student that gets them acclimated enough before the progress on to internship, etc., the types of patients they are seeing in terms of disease severity, the academic centers that students are rotating at, etc.) which are critical not only to getting letters for residency that actually mean something to residency faculty, but for being prepared for internship (no one in residency is going to reteach you something your med school should have taught you). Right now their clinical clerkships are at Kaiser and Dignity, which are community hospitals, not university affiliated academic teaching hospitals, one of whose main jobs is to actually teach and educate medical students. Academic hospitals are well versed in how to teach med students, how to grade med students properly and credibly, etc. How are these community hospitals going to “learn” to do that? Again these things are not “profitable”, and it takes a while to get into the groove of doing that. This matters because it takes time to teach med students. If you removed all med students from a hospital, I guarantee you the hospital would move very fast in terms of patient care. But there are teaching hospitals for a reason, as learning medicine takes time. And I haven’t even touched the “for-profit” for their shareholders status of the school.
That’s another thing - where do they plan on putting their graduates? Do they have residency positions specifically set aside for them? If so, in what specialties? Residency program directors realize this and will judge your education accordingly when your school is new, and your education will be evaluated on more than just a three digit boards score. It’s not a simple I’ll get a fantastic board score and I’m set (I would know, as I did quite well, but that’s not how my residency application was evaluated in full, that was 1 metric of many). They know which schools pump out great graduates and which ones really don’t. Oh and you can forget about getting any real good clinical research at this med school in certain specialties as medical research isn’t often “profitable”, it’s part of a medical school academic mission as are other components – ie. didactic teaching. UC Davis in the same city has their own students, so those students will get those opportunities before CNU students ever will, who will be seen and treated as visiting students. A lot of what medical schools do for their students to match into residencies isn’t “profitable” from a Wall Street shareholder’s perspective but are critical to medical student education. In one of the articles CNU says it is focused on primary care (this is usually general IM, general Pediatrics, Family Medicine). That raises alarm bells for me, as it makes me think they may not be able to get their students into non-primary care specialties as they just don’t have the resources and opportunities needed and w/no previous reputation residencies have nothing to go by).
In other words, this school would fail on so many of these questions from the AAMC that you should ask of medical schools, as we just don’t have the answers to them or we do and the answers aren’t that great: https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/1/docs/advising/prehealth/New_Logo-35_Questions.pdf
To get into the 6 year program requires an SAT score of 1360, and the 7 year program a score of 1290. I mean these are ridiculously low cutoff scores for a combined medical school program like this. It tells me they are really shooting for as low as the market will allow them, even if it means their students may end up failing out with the debt incurred. You’re committing yourself to attending this combined program, without knowing any of the things above or ability to find out, at max if you do the 6 year, the inaugural class will be finished with the 2nd year of med school before you enter the med school, if you do the 7 year the inaugural class will be finished with the 3rd year of med school before you enter. By then, you’re already effectively locked in without getting to act on that information, and a real expensive price at that, at $56,500. This is more expensive than Emory, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, Miami-Miller, Mt. Sinai, and the list goes on:
https://services.aamc.org/tsfreports/report.cfm?order_by=tot_res_fee_sort&year_of_study=2016&select_control=PRI (you can sort by cost by clicking on the specific underlined header)
I’m not even going to comment on what a slimeball I think Mr. Cheung is, based on reading the California Business articles below and comments from credible veteran SDN faculty both in admissions and attendings commenting on the school in terms of accreditation.
Even in their first inaugural medical school class of 60 students, they have an MCAT score average which is fine at 32, but their cumulative (so not just science) undergraduate GPA is 3.48, which is ridiculously low for an allopathic US medical school: http://medicine.cnsu.edu/shareddocs/DemographicData.pdf
Media articles:
http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2015/06/11/california-northstate-university-accreditation.html
http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/print-edition/2013/07/12/medical-school-elk-grove-front-burner.html
http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2015/03/11/northstate-medical-school-dean-resigns.html
http://fox40.com/2015/06/11/elk-grove-medical-school-gets-rare-accreditation/
SDN (there are many more threads about this but this is the main one):
http://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/threads/california-northstate-gains-accreditation.1142846/